In I AM RYAN, Hobart turns an unusual part of his own life into a comedy shaped by absurdity, satire, and questions of identity. In the interview, the musician, actor, writer, and host reflects on taking on multiple creative roles in the film, the way music influenced its comic rhythm, and his interest in exploring, through humor and discomfort, the distance between who we are and who the world decides we are.
I AM RYAN comes from a very personal place, since you spent years being told that you look like Ryan Reynolds and even worked as his body-double. At what point did that stop being just an unusual part of your life and become a film?
It’s crazy, I remember the moment I decided to write the first outline for this film and it was in 2017. I just had done my first doubling job for Ryan Reynolds on a movie poster. They used my body and cut out my face. They left in my hair! That’s either a great premise for a movie or a reason to call a therapist. I went with the movie. It seemed cheaper.
You are attached to the project as star, writer, composer, and producer, which shows a remarkably broad creative involvement. How did you balance so many roles within one film without losing the spontaneity of the comedy?
Poorly, and then all at once, which turns out to be its own kind of rhythm. The honest answer is that when you’re doing everything, you stop being precious about any one thing. That freedom is actually where the funniest stuff lives. Comedy lives in the gaps between the roles, where no one’s quite in charge. I just got lucky to have great people around me to let me pretend to know what I was doing.
The film plays with fame, appearance, imposture, and the line between reality and illusion. What were you most interested in exploring beneath that seemingly absurd humor?
The space between who you are and who the world decides you are. That’s genuinely strange territory, and comedy is the only tool I’ve found that can poke around in it without everything collapsing. The absurdity isn’t a disguise for the deeper question, it is the deeper question.
I AM RYAN has been described as blending the cringe comedy of The Office with the sharp satire of This Is Spinal Tap. What were your biggest influences in shaping the tone of this story?
The Office taught me that the most uncomfortable truths land hardest when everyone’s pretending they’re fine. Spinal Tap taught me that sincerity and satire aren’t opposites. I believe the funniest thing you can do is mean it completely. I wanted I Am Ryan to sit in that same strange, earnest place where you’re laughing but you’re also not entirely sure at what.
As someone who has experienced Hollywood from the inside, including in such unusual roles as a body-double, to what extent does the film draw from real experiences and to what extent does it fully embrace invention?
Let’s say the emotional truth is autobiographical and the specifics are highly fictionalized, for legal reasons and self-preservation. What’s real is the feeling of existing in a space that was built for someone else. The rest I made up, embellished, or blamed on a character.
Your career moves through music, live performance, acting, video game composition, and now a feature film with such a personal signature. How do all of those creative languages come together in you as an artist?
Great question! I wish I had a really artistic answer to this one but the funny and real response to me is this. They’re all just different ways of lying convincingly in front of people. Music, performance, film… at the core of each one is the same act: you’re trying to make someone feel something true through something constructed. I stopped thinking of them as separate disciplines a long time ago. They’re just different rooms in the same slightly chaotic house. My goal is to make sure to create things that I like while hoping that I’ve made the audience feel something true I think I said that twice…that’s my bad.
You have composed for very different worlds, from Rock Band to Deadpool, while continuing to release original music. How did your musical sensibility influence the making of I AM RYAN, including the rhythm of its comedy?
Comedy and music to me are basically the same thing. I think both are entirely about timing, tension, and knowing exactly when to let the silence breathe. Writing scores taught me to trust the pause. A joke that lands in a film is structurally identical to a chord resolution. You set up the expectation, you delay it just long enough, and then you either deliver or subvert.
With the film arriving in theaters on May 22, 2026, what do you most hope audiences take with them when they leave the screening: the laughter, the satire about celebrity, or a deeper reflection on identity?
The laughter first! Because if that’s not working, none of the rest matters. But underneath that, I hope they walk out with a slightly looser grip on whoever they’ve decided they’re supposed to be. Identity is a lot more negotiable than we’re told. That’s terrifying and also, I think, pretty freeing. Or at the very least, good material.
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